


No Lesser Nation

by Karracaz, MaryStacy



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: F/M, Interspecies Romance, L.L. "Dusty" Jones, L.L. MacLeod, Vulcan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:46:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karracaz/pseuds/Karracaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryStacy/pseuds/MaryStacy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A pregnant Amanda fears for her life...</p><p>Written by   Llwellyn S. Macleod aka Dusty Jones.</p><p>In Memory</p><p>"Dusty Jones, writer, editor of LIAPITA (Logic is a Pain in the Ass) and True Vulcan Confessions. Affectionately known as Commodore Hotel to the August Party set, and one of the original co-chairs of the August Party. Worked alongside Mary Stacy and Mark Lenard Sarek at cons for juvenile diabetes. Died in 2003 from cancer.'[1]<br/>Author of Sellout (a Krepe Paper) which appeared in True Vulcan Confessions<br/>Under the name of L.L. MacLeod she wrote Little White Lies, Too Long A Frost and A Vulcan Tea Party which appeared in True Vulcan Confessions and LIAPITA</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Lesser Nation

No Lesser Nation

by Llwellyn S. Macleod

000

 

They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations... - Henry Beston

 

000

 

When I-Chaya came padding back in, she knew he was gone. He was going up to Space Central Orbiting so he had worn trousers instead of a robe. He had laid out his suit the night before, and this morning when he’d thought she’d gone back to sleep, he’d laid out clothes for her. He’d got himself breakfast, and he’d fed I-Chaya, and before he went, he tried to get her to put that thing on.

“I’m not getting dressed this morning,” she’d told him.

He’d tried to coax her. “I want to see if it fits.”

Why? So he could buy more of them?

“Of course it fits. How can it not fit?”

And she’d gone down to the study in her father’s old bathrobe and pulled out all her books and her papers and started working. And that had been that.

A.J. pulled her taps first but couldn’t get interested in any of them. She had too many in the first place. She had keywords set that she didn’t need anymore. 

“Vulcan.”

Every day she could feel the heat, see the sand. She could watch one native specimen walk, talk, sleep, and feed his face on a daily basis and at close range.

 

No, she’d keep it set. It was interesting to see what the interstellar press was saying about them.

I-Chaya saw something outside, probably one of those little teko lizards that got in and walked on the ceiling at night. Whatever it was, the ragged tuft at the end of his tail twitched as it hung over the edge of the big chest he was sitting on. Sarek’s old school trunk actually, carved out of wood and very deep from front to back.

“I-Chaya used to sleep in it, “ Sarek had said.

With all the claw and tooth marks on it she could believe that, even if she couldn’t imagine the huge beast fitting inside the thing. Sarek had put the chest under the study window ot I-Chaya could look out on the garden without standing on his hind legs and ripping the drapes from the walls. It didn’t do anything about his slobbering all over the window, though.

Something in the garden so completely captured I-Chaya suddenly that he fell off the chest in excitement and scrambled form the room, displacing throw rugs as he went. A.J. heard the side door crash open and spring shut again. At least selats didn’t bark.

The room grew quiet again, and more sunlight angled across her desk now that I-Chaya wasn’t blocking the window over the chest. Sarek liked that chest. It was practically the only piece of furniture he had brought here from his mother’s house.

 

Sometimes she wondered how much of that had been his own choice. They didn’t discuss his family. She’d met them all that once in Taimun; she hadn’t seen any of them since. Even when they’d gone to bring I-Chaya to their new house, Sarek had gone into his mother’s house alone to get the animal and his food. She’d just waited in the car.

000

Discard?

The screen was blinking at her. People abandoned topics as they got older. When she’d first come to Vulcan, she’d had nothing to do, so she’d read everything. Now...well, even with Sarek gone all day she had coursework to do.

“The Federation University has a node here,” Sarek had said.

So, where didn’t it? There was no real faculty on Vulcan, so there were no meetings and no live links. There were discussion packets. She could prepare comments and reply to other people’s at any time of the day or night and cue them out.

It was so civilized; everyone got a chance to ‘talk’ without being interrupted, but she missed seeing people face to face. Written words always came across cold. Vulcan didn’t support off-world vid without commercial permits, so there wasn’t anything she could do about it. The intake program that Sarek had talked about her participating in had disappeared into the desert sand shortly after he’d sent for her to come out form Earth. It didn’t take an antimatter scientist to figure out why.

000

The light shifted. I-Chaya was out in the garden looking in through the window. The ground level outside was higher than the floor level of the study. They were trying to grow bushes there.

“I-Chaya...” She tried to wave him away. He didn’t understand. She had to get up and go to the window. “I-Chaya! Get out of the bushes! Go there!”

She was pointing and waving her arms. He thought she was playing with him.n “No, I-Chaya!”

He stood up on his hind legs and put his front paws on the window. It was old glass. He was going to break it. “No! Down!”

He put his big nose on the window and sneezed. “I-Chaya...”

Something else caught his attention then because he got down and trotted away from the window. The last thing she saw was the snap of his tail around the trunk of the vento tree.

000

Discard? Discard? Discard? Discard?

All, right, all right, all right, all right! She got out of her taps and brought up her extracts.

There was not much here. Her advisor had warned her, but she’d been stubborn. She’d toyed with the idea of doing her graduate work on Vulcan for almost as long as she’d known Sarek. Now, she was living on Vulcan; she was married to a Vulcan.

And I should have a Vulcan family, too.

There had been one she thought she might be able to approach there in Taimun. In that redwood forest of Sarek’s family, there’d been one - a grown woman, surprisingly her own size. At a distance, she’d thought this. But of all of those people gathered at that great house for the holiday, this one woman - Sarek’s mother’s cousin, big in tribal politics - had been the only one who’d shown open disapproval of A.J before anyone knew she and Sarek were married.

 

It didn’t matter. She was still in a unique position, in unexplored territory as far as the Federation University was concerned. No one else had access to the things she did now simply by living beyond the outworld part of the city. In another year or two, it would all change. But for now - she’d simply timed it well. 

So in spite of her inexperience, and if for no other reason than she was there and they weren’t, the graduate school had approved her work.

And there was virtually nothing to work from. But even here, time had been with her once again.

“Why aren’t these statistics available on the public links?” she’d asked the one person she could ask who would know.

“Who but a benor would need such information?” T’Saian had said.

The Vulcan answer for everything.

So, now she had some basic statistics for comparison: A midwife gave her a little book of weights and time scales and she had more information on the earliest part of Vulcan life than anyone off the planet.

“Developmental psychologists begin at the beginning,” she’d explained to benor T’Saian.

And now, the beginning made her nervous.

000

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph...”

 

She’d left the door to the study open a crack. With panting and a snort and a toss of his head, I-Chaya had shoved the door open and padded in, muzzle still dripping with water from the kitchen. He had a big, half-barrel of a bowl there, and when he drank, the loud sloshing and slurping always made her laugh. And when she laughed, he always tried to sniff her face.

Now, he padded over to her desk and put his soggy face on her knee.

“Oh, I-Chaya...”

It took the tail and part of one side of her bathrobe to wring the water out of the soft beard of fur hanging form his chin. She eased out of the bathrobe and dropped it over the arm of her chair, spreading the soggy part on the bare floor. I-Chaya sniffed at the part of the bathrobe that was wet as if he’d never seen it before, then shook his head and splattered her screen.

A.J watched two more drops fall from his beard.

“As soon as I get changed, I’m going to get my scissors and trim - “

Fur and water flew, and I-Chaya was gone. How did he know what she was going to do? He certainly hadn’t known what she’d said. The only English words he’d learned so far were cookie and bye-bye.

000

 

Somebody was talking. Oh. Sarek had left the vid on in the spare bedroom. The picture was off but the sound droned on in Vulcan. There were no translation channels or converters. And no plans to develop any.

Sarek had made a little program for her so she could convert units of measure from Vulcan to Terran and back again. She’d looked on and off for four days before she found there were no published translation tables.

“Who would want such a thing, A.J.?”

Again - the Vulcan answer to everything.

It was the same thing for language courses. There were none. Vulcans learned alien - outworld, they called them - languages to communicate off Vulcan. They weren’t much interested in having other people learn their language. She’d had to start off with an old primer of Sarek’s and create a course for herself, asking Sarek questions as she went.

At that point, she understood just about anything she read if the subject matter was within her grasp, but she probably understood less than half of what she heard in normal Vulcan conversation. She knew her numbers and parts of the body and names of pieces of furniture, but that was about it. It made for some interesting conversations.

She turned the vid off and headed back to find something dry to put on.

000

 

The shower felt good. that was her whole life these days: running through the shower and lying in front of the directed vents to air dry. And running to the bathroom. That was another fun thing these days. She was having a lot of fun these days.

She reached for the shampoo.

Damn! He’d been into her shampoo again. Most of the time he used that Vulcan astringent stuff, but he was getting into the shampoo more and more. He couldn’t wear Terran aftershave, but he liked the shampoo. She shouldn’t have told him how nice it made his hair smell.

That thing was still there: with underwear beside it on the bed and shoes beneath it on the floor. She was not going to wear it. It was shapeless, it was made like a tent, and she would probably trip over the hem and kill herself.

And, for God’s sake, she wasn’t really showing that much yet.

 

Her Earth clothes didn’t fit, that was the only problem. Of course they didn’t. They were all tailored tweed and gab and flannel. Sarek never bought her any synthetics. They were too hot to wear now anyway, and her summer things didn’t protect her enough from the Vulcan sun.

 

Well...so, her pants were too tight. But she didn’t have to wear maternity clothes yet and she was not going to wear maternity clothes yet. There was no reason for her to wear maternity clothes when she could still get into her sweatsuit. 

She swept the long gown up and let it drop in the middle of the bed so she could sit on the edge and put her sweatpants on.

The bed. He’d done it again. He’d made the bed before he left and put the quilt on it. He didn’t understand saving things for best.

“It is your favorite. It is no good put away where you cannot see it.”

It was too good to use. Each block was pieced together by hand in natural fabrics, then hand-quilted through three layers of material. It was not one of the more familiar designs, and the quilter had made mistakes in the design proportions and in the overall dimensions, so that, by accident, it fit her Emperor-sized bed. It was absolutely beautiful. And it was a present from Sarek.

“There will be no argument.”

He’d gotten his wish. She’d been speechless.

“It was ‘on sale’.”

She’d saved the tag somewhere - a little hand-lettered card with the name of the design and the description of the materials.

“There was a mistake in the calculations - a radius instead of a diameter. The traditional design was not preserved, so it was ‘on sale’.”

He’d thought of the sale part afterward: a half-understood hedge in case she protested. Once his mind was made up he hadn’t had much choice. Emperor beds had gone out of style in her grandparents’ time. It was probably the only quilt at the folk festival that would have fit, and then, that was only by accident.

One by one he’d told her all the details he’d been told about the quilt. It was funny to her now that she could remember them. She hadn’t been paying attention to what he was saying then. She had been listening to the soft buzz of his voice, feeling it resonate in his chest, feeling his absent hand smoothing her waist.

 

000

“I-Chaya...get out of that bathroom...”

 

He had to be wherever she was. When Sarek wasn’t home, he followed her around and lay near her feet, waiting for her to trip over him.

 

When he wasn’t lying on her feet, he stationed himself in between her and every door so that she couldn’t leave a room without him knowing it. Even Sarek had a hard time stepping over I-Chaya. He wanted to be spoiled and given attention all the time.

The baby was due not long after her birthday. Pets sometimes got jealous of new babies. They’d have to watch I-Chaya - he was bigger than a lion.

000

 

This wasn’t the right time to have a baby. She’d never imagined herself in graduate school with a baby to take care of. She’d thought, when she had thought about it, that she’d get her degrees, then maybe marry someone working in a related field with which she’d have lots in common but with no chance for any professional competition to make things uncomfortable for them. Then maybe, at thirty or so, she might decide to have a baby.

Maybe. she’d be much older that she was now in any case and settled, and with a full professorship at a university with a perpetually funded developmental facility. In the summer, she’d go home to the Cape.

No. That wasn’t true. She hadn’t ever really been able to imagine all of that - being married to someone and having children.

 

There was something rather romantic about never marrying. Aunt J.E. Jaquith had never married. Staying with her in Boston was like watching a political dram unfold. Daddy had vacillated about what was worse - Aunt J’s brand of supervision or the lack of it she’d have in a dorm on campus.

Living with Aunt J had been good for her. she’d gotten to meet most of the local Boston politicians, and in her second semester at Harvard, she’d even signed up for a course they were offering called the ‘Sociological Aspects of Politics’. It was fascinating. And of course, politics had been what Aunt J and Sarek had in common. Sarek had liked her immediately. He hadn’t been able to understand though, why she wasn’t married.  
“On Vulcan, she would be married.”  
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be married.”  
He didn’t believe that. They’d had a long argument about it later.She’d gotten really steamed at him.

000

“I-Chaya, put that down.” The animal was standing in the bathroom with Sarek’s nightshirt in his mouth. He didn’t know the English words, but he knew what she meant. “I-Chaya - “

He made his pooah, pooah sound. Then he tried to turn himself around between the sink and the door and slink away with the nightshirt still in his mouth.

The only thing he managed to do was knock everything from the edge of the sink into the toilet. She said some words that Sarek would have had a fit about if he’d been there, and the damned animal bolted out of there then, head down, tail down, ears back.

A.J. got down on her hands and knees to fish everything out of the toilet and left it all to dry on the edge of the sink. Well, she’d wanted a water toilet.

Sarek had it installed for her at the same time they put in the big tub. The neighbors had seen the preforms come in. They probably thought it was all very decadent. I-Chaya had knocked the baby powder off the sink that day, too.

Then he’d stuck his head into the toilet to see where it had gone. She remembered yelling at him and startling him. He’d found he was stuck, panicked, jumped back yelping, tore the seat and the lid clean off, and went running from the room with the toilet seat hanging from his neck like some absurd horse collar with the lid turned back on its hinges, banging against the top of his head.

 

They’d chased him around and around the house, getting in each other’s ways, shouting useless directions. Sarek had finally cornered him back in the bathroom and got him quieted enough to shift the toilet seat the bare eighth of a turn it needed to pull off easily over the selat’s ears.

The poor animal had been terrified; the whites of his eyes showed, and he was whining. A.J. remembered Sarek comforting the big beast: the poor thing had hidden his big muzzle up past his eyes in Sarek’s armpit and moved his tail slowly when Sarek scratched the fur on his back. A.J. remembered scratching him, too, when he came out of hiding.

“Oh, you’re such a big baby.”

“He was the smallest,” Sarek had said. And she’d heard for the first time then how Sarek had saved him from being the runt in an over-large litter by keeping him warm and feeding him from a bottle. She’d known he’d brought I-Chaya home with him from school one term, but she hadn’t known why. She’d wondered why a big grasslands animal like a selat was living in a desert city. Now, she knew.

000

The waistband of her sweatpants felt like a cutting rope. She found that the elastic had burned a thready red mark across her stomach. she pulled the waistband won below her abdomen, but that hurt worse than before.

She slid off the bed and she yanked the sweatpants down and kicked them across the floor.

She put the damnable maternity thing on.

There was a little jacket thing that went with it. It had all kinds of fussy embroidery on it. Sarek knew she didn’t like that sort of thing.

She kicked into her shoes. That animal would head straight for the garden and look for a place to hide.

 

o0o

He hadn’t gone very far.

I-Chaya had Sarek’s nightshirt on the ground outside and was rolling on it. Flat on his back, all four legs in the air, he punched the air first with his left front and right back paws, then the other two,then the first pair, back and forth over and over, squirming this way and that in absolute ecstasy, all the time breathing in big, loud, happy pants.

“You have an itch?”

Pant-pant. Kick. Kick.

“Scratch? Scratch, I-Chaya?”

He didn’t understand. He rolled up onto his feet and took the tail of the nightshirt into his mouth. He shook his big head, waving the nightshirt like a flag. He was going to rip it.

Damn him! She went to the kitchen and got some of his big biscuits from the cupboard. They came from the Southern provinces. All I-Chaya’s food did. There was no place to buy it locally.

“Look, I-Chaya... look...cookie..”

Cookie. That had been his first English word. After he’d torn up the toilet seat Sarek ahd given him a cookie. He always felt better after he had his ‘cookie’.

“He takes right after his father,’ she’d said. Sarek hated it when she called him I-Chaya’s father.

“I am not the animals father, Amanda.” Amanda! Only when she was irritating him. 

But he was right: Sarek wasn’t I-Chaya’s father - he was the poor animals’ mother.

 

When she had the selat’s attention, AJ tossed one of the biscuits about ten feet to his right. He trotted over to the spot, still carrying the nightshirt in his mouth. He dropped it on the ground and put his foot on it while he ate the biscuit. The little fart!

 

“I-Chaya... here, boy...” She waved another biscuit at him. “Come here...come here, boy...”

I-Chaya lay down and folded his paws over Sarek’s nightshirt. He wasn’t buying it.

AJ felt her scalp prickle with sweat. Sarek would kill her if he knew she was out here in the heat. It never let up, the heat. The hot breeze would sip away at you until you dried up and blew away She drank all the time to keep up. And ran to the bathroom.

She wiped her face with her hand. A piece of hair had fallen forward and plastered itself to her cheek. She pushed it back

She was not going to cut her hair.

The last time the tonsor came, Sarek had reminded her three times that morning. He’d reminded her, too, that the tonsor didn’t come out often and that her hair grew fast as it was.

It was growing faster now. It made her nick hot when she went out during the day and it gathered up in her hood when she went out at night. When the wind blew, she could see her hair out of the corner of her eyes like a thin shadow or a dark cloud. She’d never been able to see her hair without a mirror before except for that one piece int he front that went straight up in the air until the weight of it brought it down.

The last time she’d let a tonsor near her hair, held butchered it. They didn’t know how to deal with real, follicularly curly hair on Vulcan. They had enough trouble trying to cut around Sarek’s cowlicks - his philosopher’s knots - or whatever they called them here.

“But you’ve always had curls.. your summer haircut and your winter haircut....”

But that didn’t matter. She’d never had long hair before. Maybe it was time she did. In any case, she wasn’t going to cut her hair because of a Vulcan tradition that only chiefs wore it long naturally.

If more women grew their hair, they wouldn’t need those damned ceremonial wigs that looked like living Hell about to topple over sideways every time there was a ritual to perform. If Sarek wanted a goddamned ceremonial wig around the house, he could goddamned wear it himself.

o0o

I-Chaya was watching her as if he knew what she was thinking and would tell Sarek what kind of language she had going through her mind.

“Since you are pregnant, you say things that are unpleasant.”

He’d stand there with that cool, smooth as glass expression on his face until she wanted to wring his neck. And whose fault was it that she was pregnant in the first place?

They hadn’t been supposed to be able to have children together. They’d known that before they were married. With no eugenics laws on Vulcan to muddle their plans, some of the doctors at the Annex had been thinking of cooking up something. AJ had tried to ignore them. She’d let them make a few tests at first, and they’d wanted to make more. Eventually she’d gotten aggravated and told them to just leave her alone. But then she’d just gone ahead and gotten pregnant anyway.

“What are the four biggest lies in the galaxy?” Paul Rosenberg’s big joke. The fourth - “You can’t get pregnant if you do it with a Vulcan.”

A big laugh. As if Sarek had lied to her to get her in bed with him. Sarek!

o0o

Sarek’s nightshirt hung down from between I-Chaya’s big fangs; it was all drooly and wet. The animal was just standing there waiting. It was time to play dirty.

AJ whined like a selat. I-Chaya’s ears perked. She made his pooah, pooah sound, then, too, and he cocked his head to one side. Then she covered her face with her hands and made sounds like she was crying.

It always worked. He couldn’t stand crying or whining or whimpering. Selats were social animals, very sensitive to behavioral cues.

She sneaked a look through her fingers. He was watching her, ears rotated, eyes wide. He whined back at her, but he stayed put. All right, then. Very dirty.

AJ went down on her knees, rolled to one hip, and lay on the ground. She kept her eyes covered and sobbed loud enough for the neighbors to call the police.

She heard him coming. He poked his big muzzle into her chest and tried to push her hands away from her face with the top of it.

She was ready with a biscuit. She waited until he found the rest of them on the ground behind her, then she crawled away. She had the nightshirt, and was back in the house before he knew what she was doing. she turned in the open doorway and waited for him to finish his biscuits.

“That ought to hold you for at least five minutes anyway. Now come on in.”

I-Chaya stretched both his forepaws out in front of him and bowed to her. One of these days she was going to have to teach him to shake hands.

He made his pooah sound.

“No. Now come in the house.” He lay down on the path and put his head on his front paws. “Then stay out there.”

o0o

The vid in the spare bedroom was back on. “Sarek?”

He wouldn’t have come home this early and sneaked in and turned it on.. He wasn’t above joking by any means, but this wasn’t the sort of thing he’d do.

Sarek appreciated the consideration of the absurd. Once, when they’d still been living on Earth, he’d come back from a business trip to Sweden with a picture of himself standing next to a sign at an entrance to a glacier preserve with the remarkable name of Sarek National Park.

“And I suppose you think they named the whole place after you,” she’d kidded him. He’d given her one of his looks and said in that wide-eyed, innocent way of his, “Why not?”

That look ... nowadays, all he had to do was give her that look to make her laugh.

o0o

She snapped the sound off again. There was no one in the house but her. I-Chaya wold have had to pass her in the hall to get there to turn it on. Anyone would have had to pass her. “I-Chaya...”

 

If you called him when he was anywhere in the house, he came running just in case you were planning to feed him. He wasn’t in the house. Even if he were, he’d never have been able to turn the unit on with his nose or his paw - without knocking it off the table.

A snooze alarm. Of course. It kept turning itself back on until you were conscious enough to turn it off for real. She pushed this and that but had no idea whether she’d turned it off for good or not.

She’d never used a vulcan alarm. She always woke up before Sarek did. He must have set it the night before.

He’d had the whole day planned out for them. They were going to hire a car with a touring port and spend the whole day together. He knew where he could get eggs and milk. He was going to make her French toast for dinner.

Then, late, he’d gotten a call. They could get him into a high-level conference as a recorder if he wold be at Council Place in the morning.

“It would mean disappointing you.”

“It’s important for your career.”

 

Of course he knew that. And, of course he would go to the conference. It was just his way of showing her that her feelings were something he always thought about.

So he’d just held her hand tighter and looked at her with those sandy green eyes and reminded her: “You would be ‘the wife of an ambassador’.”

When she’d told him that, she’d been kidding. The offer had been there, she’d been impressed, she’d thought what a wonderful opportunity! But she hadn’t meant hi to take what she said about being married to an ambassador so seriously, to think that, if it didn’t work out, she would be disappointed in him. The thing was, it wasn’t hard to imagine him there. He hadn’t been happy teaching. He hadn’t been unhappy, but it wasn’t what he did. It was the arrangement he’d made to stay near her.

The research he’d been involved in at Sinse hadn’t been interesting to him for a long time. She’d always felt, even before she knew him very well, that he had come out to Earth less for the exchange of science than for the new horizons. He’d already lived a life before she’d met him; he was a grown man and decorated by the Vulcan Scientific Legion of Honor before she was even born. Now, he was almost 67 years old, but he was still a young man. And yet, he’d been in research at a professional level for more than 30 years - a whole lifetime for some.

He didn’t discuss his former life with her, and teasing him about it didn’t do any good. If she persisted, he simply clammed up, hurt that she would pry. She knew his family had half-arranged a marriage for him that his marriage to her on Earth had made unnecessary. She even suspected there’d been another arrangement before that one had fallen through. The only thins she knew for certain was that held never been married before and that he had no children.

“No other woman’s daughter can make claim to my line or my property.”

He’d said that so solemnly, so formally, as if it was something she needed to know and that he was required to tell her.

They had an unusual inheritance pattern here, a modern variant of their traditional matrilineal system and entirely separate from the reckonings of kinship. Sarek said it was as new as his great-grandmother’s time. The more questions she asked, the more she had become aware of a number of movements in tribal politics that were very concerned with the descendants of Sarek’s mother. Sarek’s sisters and their children didn’t count in this because of something about their being children of the second husband who was from the wrong tribe or the wrong consolidation - or the wrong bridge club or something equally ridiculous. It was silly, it was stupid, and she would have nothing more to do with it.

As if she had anything to do with it in the first place. She knew what they thought, what they said among themselves.

She’d accidentally overheard a conversation between Sarek and his stepfather. They’d thought she was asleep. She couldn’t comprehend much spoken Vulcan, but she’d been able to understand that Sarek’s family would never feel any obligation to their baby because they couldn’t consider Sarek the father of it. That, they knew, was physiologically impossible, scientifically untenable, and sarek was being foolish and misguided and emotional for believing such a story - that the baby his Terran wife was carrying was his.

 

That’s what made her the maddest; that it wasn’t the idea that Sarek wasn’t her baby’s father that annoyed them, but Sarek’s insistence that he was the father despite the common knowledge that Terrans and Vulcans couldn’t interbreed. Whenever she thought about it, her hands shook in anger.

“You will stop the crying,” he had said one day in a tone that had betrayed his exasperation with her and the subject. “There is no logical reason for you to be crying.”

“They hurt my feelings!”

“They do not. You allow their ignorant words more import than they deserve.”

“They’re accusing your wife of having an affair with an Earth man!”

She must have turned red in rage; she had felt her face go hot.

“Why does this matter to you?”

She remembered beginning to turn her rage on him. He had waved her off.

“They do not know you as I do,” he had said, “You do not love an Earth man. I am the one.”

o0o

 

His nightshirt was in a heap on her desk where she’d left it . She examined it for tooth marks. There weren’t any. It wouldn’t matter. She’d gotten him a brand-new one just like it.

“You do not love an Earth man. I am the one.”

It was that simple to him. Stupidly, she folded the dirty nightshirt. Maybe she shouldn’t have made such a fuss that morning about the maternity thing.

AJ climbed into her chair. Sarek had bought her a stool to put her feet on so they wouldn’t dangle from high-seated Vulcan chairs. She always teased him that he’d bought it for her to stand on so he didn’t have to bend down so much when she kissed him. It was especially helpful now that she was pregnant. But he hadn’t known that then.

Nobody could have known then.

o0o

The baby come out of the Lost Days, the five ‘extra’ days left over after the ten even months. The whole world came to a halt for praying, fasting, and meditation. She and Sarek had spent it in bed.

At least, the latter part of it in bed. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, Sarek didn’t know what to do with himself. When they’d lived on Earth, he’d been able to pass the holiday with no problem - he wasn’t a religious person, and without other Vulcans around him in Cambridge, the days had gone by unnoticed. In previous years, he and his mother - from whom he’d gotten his lack of religious fervor - had found some project to do together at home, or his sister had gotten him working with her in the garden.

But this last time...

She’d seen Sarek stir crazy in a New England winter when it was too cold for him outside and the taxis weren’t running regularly so they couldn’t go anywhere. He couldn’t read English well then. He’d grown beyond the connotative limitations of his text reader but his patience with it had not. She’d gotten tired of reading to him out loud - or at least her voice had - and the snow had kept falling and the temperature kept dropping and the wind chill had gotten fiercer.

Sarek hadn’t been able to spell well enough in English to play Scrabble, and Monopoly didn’t work well with just two people - and she hated having to let the computer play with them. Sarek liked playing poker, especially if they could play for something that amused him like different kinds of M&Ms but eventually it was cabin fever that got to him.

But during the Lost Days here in ShiKar, it was something different. The streets were variously deserted or lined with silent processions. During the quiet times, she tried to get him to go our for a walk. Surely, he wasn’t the only one in the city not praying and meditating. There wasn’t a law, was there?

“It would appear disrespectful,” he’d said. But that evening, he hadn’t been able to stand it any more, and they had slipped out in the coming twilight and gone down to the desert gates.

ShiKar was an old city - older than it looked Most of the buildings you could see now had been built in Sarek’s lifetime. Stranded in the middle of the Sas-a-shar, ShiKar had been a sparsely populated relic of an ancient outpost until it was tagged for the site of the planet-wide capital. Sarek’s step-father’s people were from here, a prominent family in the city by the simple virtue of being there the longest. Sarek’s mother and father had come to ShiKar to buy a house before Sarek was born, but his mother had gone back to Taimun so he could be born there.

They didn that here - they went home to have babies. All their female relatives were with them. They didn’t go to hospitals; they had a special place - open and airy and with the best library in the city. The whole thing - the library, the athletic club, the baths - had a long name that was difficult to pronounce, but it meant ‘House of Life”.

“That is not what it means, but that is what it is.”

She’d always thought it sounded wonderful; all the women in your family around you to help you and guide you. But none of that was available to her.

She had no-one to turn to for advice, to ask the kinds of questions you didn’t ask a doctor. The only Terran woman she knew on vulcan was the Earth ambassador’s wife, but Barbara Rosenberg knew less about having a baby than she did. And because Sarek’s family didn’t approve of her, the Vulcan women had never taken her into their circle, so she didn’t have that extensive support system either.

Men weren’t allowed in the room when a Vulcan woman delivered, so unless she went to the maternity ward at the Annex, no one she loved would be with her when her baby was born.

“If the husband is allowed, then I will be with you.”

He didn’t want to be there; it was an alien idea to him, something that made him uneasy. But...

“There is no one else for you,” he had said. “No women in the house to be with you. I will do the best that I can for you.”

He tried. He always tried.

Damnit! She couldn’t find any tissues. Sarek could produce them out of thin air.

She cried too much. Everything seemed to bring tears these days. Sarek just made comments about ‘only hormones,’ but that only made her angry.

But he always had tissues for her.

She wondered if he had left for Space Central Orbiting by now or if he was still at Council Place. She wasn’t sure how late he’d be getting home. She didn’t know if he’d taken his cloak. After the sun went down, it could become quite chilly.

o0o

They’d put on cloaks with hoods and walked down streets that night during the Lost Days, keeping in shadows, slipping down alleys between garden walls without making a sound.

At one point, they’d waited behind the weeping branches of a safety tree and watched one of the processions go by before they went on. It had reminded her of hiding under the old dinghy near Fitzie’s pier with illegal pyros until the police went by.

She and Sarek had gotten all the way to the park buffer without turning on their hood lamps, but under the trees, the twilight didn’t penetrate, and she’d had to grope for his hand. “We don’t have the moon, but we have stars.”

And what stars....

They went out through Hai-not gate and walked a short distance out onto the desert. There was a prominent outcropping of shiny rock with a well-worn face turned away from the city. They climbed to a comfortable spot and he gave her his arm for a pillow while pointing out the stars he knew. “When I came back from Earth, I found the one where you were.” 

It wasn’t particularly bright or a pretty color, but it had made her sit up and look at it for a long time. She hadn’t realized before how far away she was from home.

“Why didn’t you bring me out here before?” The skies were like velvet and the light of the city was behind them. Without a moon to cast light on the wisps of the low clouds, the stars were everywhere and seemed to gather close to the ground. He’d sat up then and cast a ghost of a shadow in starlight.

“Another time,” he had explained, “we would not have been alone.”

 

o0o

 

What in the ...

I-Chaya roared again. It was like a giant gargling gravel or a rip opening the sky.

And he roared again. She was surprised that the neighbors weren’t already ringing the hand-sets off the furniture.

 

The neighbors were curious about I-Chaya. Selats weren’t common in ShiKar. No one came out to talk with them when they took I-Chaya for walks in the evening when it was cool, but she still felt people watching from windows.

The children were braver. One day she’d noticed a group of them standing out in the court looking through the gate at I-Chaya. He’d put his muzzle through the filigree, and they’d all taken turns patting him. She’d gone out to invite them in to play, but by the time she got down to the gate they’d all gone. They never came back again.

 

o0o

He wasn’t roaring now. The selat was nowhere in sight. Whenever he was bad,he fled to the garden and tried to hide himself. He wasn’t very smart about it. He’d try to push his way into those big bushes with the fat balls of flowers on them and only end up leaving his big behind sticking out. You had to laugh at him.

The gate to the court was closed. Sarek had fixed both gates so I-Chaya couldn’t unlatch them. He had to be somewhere int he garden. “I-Chaya.”

He voice sounded tiny, and it disappeared in the thin air. She felt self-conscious yelling here. The residential streets were quiet. The children were all in school. The serene contemplative atmosphere was like a blanket.

AJ walked to the gate and looked out. there was nobody in the court. An old tower bell rocked up high somewhere in the stiff breeze. “I-Chaya.”

He wasn’t stuffed under the bushes. There weren’t a lot of places an animal that big could hide in this yard without some part of him showing.

“I-Chaya. Cookie...”

 

Now her voice was snatched from her mouth by the wind. The air came by cooler and fresher, carrying a few stray leaves. There was going to be a storm, and that damned animal was going to be caught out in it.

The air lifted her hair and made her think of the ocean. She wondered if it would finally rain.

o0o

Sarek had never seen a thunderstorm with rain until that first spring. She’d been at his apartment trying to make sense of elementary physics when the city had gotten hit with the biggest electrical storm in years. She’d stood in that big curved picture window in Sarek’s dining room until he’d made her get down. He’d actually thought he could drown just walking in a rain coming down that hard.

She remembered the safety switches had overloaded and blown in the roof plant, knocking all the power out in the building. They had sat in the dark and told each other folk tales. She knew that Creation myths could be very revealing about a culture, so she’d told her his equivalent.

She’d fallen in love with his world that day; he’d begun to feel he’d have to rescue her from hers.

o0o

Something moved near the door. AJ caught a glimpse of a tufted tail disappearing into the house. She followed it in. It headed straight for the study.

“Don’t you dare...”

He’d found the nightshirt where she’d left it folded on the corner of her desk. He was sniffing at it. “I-Chaya...”

He snagged the nightshirt with one of his fangs and pulled it halfway off the table. Then he sunk his short front teeth into it. That was enough. “Damnit, I-Chaya!”

She thought she heard a tearing sound. It wasn’t a tearing sound. “Don’t you growl at me...”

He growled again. This time not raspy and full of breath but deep in his throat. While she watched, his forehead wrinkled and his jowls drew back to show side teeth. “I-Chaya...”

The rumble was louder. The grip on the other end of the nightshirt loosened. Suddenly, she held it swinging in her hands. “What’s the matter with you, I-Chaya?”

He’d never growled at her. He was very good-natured and gentle. The most aggressive thing he ever did was try to sneak food off your plate when you weren’t looking.

AJ backed away. I-Chaya followed her. “Leave me alone...”

His eyes were glassy; his breath came in snarls. She could see the door to the hallway in her mind’s eye. If she backed straight, she would reach it in about a dozen steps.

The snarls came louder. There was something wrong. He never did this, not even if you took one of his toys away. He had a big ball made out of the same material as one of Sarek’s carry bags, stuffed tight with old rags. He loved you to throw it for him to fetch. She could barely heft the thing, but Sarek could...

The roar terrified her. Inside the house, it rattled the delicate glass-fronted bookcases and boomed off the walls. AJ stumbled against the writing stand and nearly fell. I-Chaya moved toward her in a crouch. She threw the nightshirt in his face and fled.

She ran for the bedroom and then realized how stupid that was. She couldn’t keep him out of the bedroom. If she got out of the house, she could let herself out onto the street and lock the gate behind her. I-Chaya would be isolated until she could get help.

She passed the bend in the hall. I-Chaya had gone the other way and was blocking the door to the walk. He growled deeply and lowered his head.

AJ made a run for it. The door to the garden was back the other way. He might not be able to keep up on the slippery floors. She rounded the bend to the other hallway, and he was already there, waiting for her.

She was winded. Her heart was beating too fast. If she tried for the other outside door again, he’d just go back around the square corridor and cut her off again Her legs were going to give out in fear.

She realized then that the basement door was right beside her. I-Chaya saw her put her hand on the lever. She saw him see her as if he understood what she was planning. A sunbeam slanted through the sidelight and his eyes flashed red. His eyes were lit with a cunning he didn’t have There was something very wrong with this animal.

I-Chaya started forward. there was nowhere else to go. “Where’s Sarek? Where’s Sarek, I-Chaya?”

The selat automatically swung his head around to look behind him. His tail even went up like a flag. In those few moments when the animal’s concentration was broken, AJ made her move.

She pressed the basement door lever down. It stuck once, then by rocking it in its track, she got it to slide over enough to get through it and slide it shut.

It wasn’t enough. The door didn’t lock. Vulcan doorknobs were easy for I-Chaya - only a lever, really. The only thing that slowed him down was having to drag a door sideways. He only needed it open a crack for his claws, and then just enough of his big muzzle to push through.

Something rattled. AJ gripped the door handle. No good. Either an up or down motion opened it. She’d never be able to hold it dead center with those massive jaws tugging at it on the other side. She started to step back, stumbled, and caught herself on the rack near the top of the stairs. Sarek’s javelins hung there in their case. He hadn’t used them since he’d tried to teach her how to use them and she’d fainted on the field from the heat and the exertion.

Something moved on the other side of the door. I-Chaya was pawing the basement door. She could hear it, and she could see the heavy lever bob up and down.

A crack of different light showed at one side, growing wider. The heavy paw withdrew. At the moment, AJ grabbed the inside end of the door and slammed it back into the frame before that awful face could poke through. She yanked her baseball bat out of the rack with the javelins and jammed it into the back of the track between the outer edge of the door and the wall.

It held. There was a pawing, a snuffling. Then the door rattled from above.

He was standing on his hind legs, trying to push the door open with his weight. It would hold. It was thick like the doors to the outside. It would hold.

He got down. She heard the heavy drop of his front paws to the floor. She heard sniffing, very faint, very muffled. That was all until she heard a loud bang, not far away and surprisingly thunderous. Damn that animal. What was he doing?

The basement door shook hard again. AJ backed down several steps. She heard I-Chaya whining through the door and frantic scratching on the wood, It was real wood, this door. It could splinter. Could he claw through it? Chew through it?

“Get away.”

She slapped the door with the heel of her hand and almost lost her balance. She looped her arm around the railing and screamed for the selat to stop. It only made him worse. The whining rose to a howl and the door rattled in a fury. There was another crash on the floor above and an actual roar from I-Chaya. 

“Get away. Get away!”

But her throat was too constricted now to make more than a squeak. I-Chaya roared again. The door vibrated with it. AJ retreated to the bottom of the steps and looked back up. The basement was well insulated; she could barely hear him now through the thick door, but she could see it vibrate. She’d only heard I-Chaya roar once before today. Sarek had coaxed him to do it with a cookie when they’d taken him out for a walk out on the edge of the desert where he wouldn’t disturb the neighbors.

Sarek. Where was Sarek?

He was probably there by now, up at Space Central Orbiting. Unless there was a briefing first he was starting all over in a new career - he had a lot to learn - but he loved it. He was intelligent enough to be competent in just about anything he tried, but this was something else. It was a challenge. She thought it could become a passion with him.

It already had. He talked and talked and talked when he came home from a meeting. It was hard for him to just sit and listen; she heard everything that he had wanted to say during the negotiations but didn’t have the authority - yet.

He would. It might not happen immediately, but it was the time to get in. Vulcan was new to the Federation and the diplomatic structure was only now being formed and put into place. And Sarek would fit that structure. Perfectly. As if he were born to it.

And he was. She could have guessed it anyway, but one look at his mother’s family and where they came from and the way they interacted with other people, and there were things she’d always noticed about Sarek that suddenly made sense within that context. It wasn’t fair, but people were chosen to do things for reasons that had nothing to do with experience or training. There were things that even the Nome Council couldn’t train into the best-qualified candidates.

And she hadn’t forgotten the way people at Space Central had acted when they found out which family had sponsored her entrance to Vulcan when she first arrived. She hadn’t forgotten, either, that certain of Sarek’s relatives were the kind of people who could talk about having a visa revoked and have it be no idle threat.

But she hadn’t needed any of that to tell her what he was. She had no trouble at all imagining Sarek in that glamorous life. What was more difficult to imagine was seeing herself standing up there beside him.

o0o

She heard the vid. Down here? She followed the sound to the far end of the basement. The picture was breaking up, but the sound was clear. Sarek must have keyed all the alarms together. The unit was sitting on a shelf next to a clear jar of hood lamps. Above  
the shelf was a cupboard with canned food she didn’t remember buying or bringing down here.

She broke the seal on a can of plomik soup and waited for the label to change color. Not as good as she made from scratch, but it was hot and she suddenly realized how hungry she was.

There were several other cans of plomik soup in the cabinet. Why would Sarek buy canned plomik soup? When she was in the mood for it, she made it herself. Sarek wouldn’t eat plomik soup if his life depended on it.

She tried to watch the vid for awhile. The rolling picture and the droning Vulcan voice were lousy company. Every once in a while she thought she heard something move on the floor above. She’d be safe if she stayed down here. If that animal could have gotten through the basement door, he’d have been down there already. She’d just have to wait until Sarek came home.

o0o

The overhead light had gone on when she’d opened the basement door. A corner of her shipping crate gleamed form under the stairs.

They’d never returned it. If Sarek had been billed for it, she didn’t know. Everything she hadn’t unpacked was still in there.

The dome light even worked. There was so much of Cambridge in this crate - Washington even - like a tiny museum to their life on Earth. Sarek’s snow-boots and his cashmere coat - and his golf clubs. He really loved that game. It had the same competitive objectives of distance. and accuracy that throwing the javelins did. He’d wanted to go to the course all the time. He’d wanted her to learn to play golf so she could go with him. She’d taken him out on his birthday that year to buy him one of those little practice putting machines, and he’d practically worn it out.

AJ sat down on one of the unopened boxes. It hadn’t occurred to her before that he had left something behind on Earth, too.

In one of the other boxes she found her Dead Elvis tapes. She hadn’t known where she’d put them. She hadn’t listened to them in... it was a lifetime away. They were packed in with clothes she and Sarek didn’t wear anymore.

Under her cashmere sweaters she foundSarek’s silk long johns. The fabric felt cool against her cheek but it had kept him so warm. Here were the silvery grey pair and the brown ones. The work of muscles through that silk...

o0o

He was up, in the bathroom, getting ready to go to meet the ambassador and her aides at Council Place that morning. The drapes were mostly drawn, the room was dim. He didn’t see her watching him.

You watch me always.

Yes, she did. She always had. Before she’d had any romantic feelings about him, she’d watched him closely. He had a definite presence that was attractive, the sort of physical aura you expected royalty to have but so often didn’t. He wasn’t boisterous, and he wasn’t aggressive until it was necessary, so watching him carefully had been the only way she could know what he was feeling.

It had taken a very long time, but she’d learned to watch his hands, the cant of his shoulders, the lift of his chin, the shift of his eyes to know whether he was truly insulted, or just annoyed, or simply bored by what was going on. Once she’d learned to read his subtle Vulcan gestures, it was as if she could see him frown or hear him laugh. Later on, when they’d grown closer, he’d asked her, been very worried, that other Earth people could see in him what she saw.

She’d told him what her friends thought of him, how they thought he was cold and stuffy and maybe a little dangerous. And she’d seen how pleased he was to know that. she’d watched him, and she’d seen how very pleased he was.

And she’d watched him this morning while he was getting ready for work. She didn’t know what it was: that she was feeling lonely with him leaving so early in the morning without their having breakfast together, or that watching him putting on trousers instead of a robe for the first time in months reminded her of their living in Cambridge, or just the silhouette of those long, lean legs about to disappear into those baggy Vulcan trousers...

“I couldn’t sleep so I got up to dress. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I couldn’t sleep, either, dear.”

She fought with the blankets until he helped her. She caught his long warm leg between hers. “I don’t like you in pants.”

He didn’t catch the joke. He’d just nudged his arms under her and had a hug and said, “You like my Vulcan ways.”

She’d locked a leg behind his knee and rubbed his back up and down the way he liked. She’d reminded him about the Lost Days and how they’d walked back from the desert together.

“I had to run to keep up with you, dear.”

“It is my legs. They are so long to yours...”

o0o

It was funny. Sitting here in her old crate int he basement she thought it was funny that of all the things she remembered from the Lost Days, of all the things they’d said to each other, after sleep and motion blurred, that the one thing that came back to her now was how warm his hands had been and the sound of his voice saying her name over and over again in her ear. She could remember all of it awake, but at the edge of sleep, it was the warm hands and the soft voice.

And she thought that, when their baby was born, she’d hold it in her arms, and she’d look at it, and all she’d be able to think about was the Lost Days and Sarek’s hands and voice.

She’d been trying to tell him that this morning. She’d been trying to find the right words. She’d had him in her arms and she’d been trying to put the words and the feelings together for him, and I-Chaya had come bursting through the door and spoiled it all.

o0o

The vid had gone dead. Or the broadcast was over. The house was quiet.

It was very quiet. AJ listened for the sound of I-Chaya prowling around on the floor above. Nothing moved. She crept up the stairs and put an ear to the door.

It was too quiet. There had been a background noise before, faint and deadened by the door, but now there was nothing. She had a crazy idea suddenly that she would be able to hear I-Chaya breathe if he were still up there.

He wasn’t up there. He’d been stampeding up there, tearing things down and slashing at the basement door. He was... he wouldn’t suddenly be quiet and docile again.

There was something very wrong with that animal. He was a mammal, after all -

“We are mammals. Placental mammals. I trust that information is sufficient.”

He could have been bitten by another animal. Something small enough to have crawled in through the filigree of the court gate. He could have been sick for a long time and neither she or Sarek would have known it.

There was nothing moving up there on the main floor. Maybe I-Chaya had given up and gone away. He’d go outside, into the garden.

Maybe he was too sick now to move. He’d crawl under a bush. He’d go to that row of bushes with the flowers near the wall and try to get in under them. It was cool in there, and he could see anybody that came through the gate or out of the house.

What time was it? How late was it? Sarek would be coming home... How long had she been in the basement?

She’d forgotten to put on her watch that morning. She’d just thrown on her bathrobe and gone down to the study. Sarek had come down there to say good-bye and she’d just waved to him from her desk, pretending to be engrossed in a textbook. She’d let him go without kissing him good-bye.

But he’d be coming home. Sarek was coming home. Sooner or later, he’d finish with that meeting, and with the debriefing afterward, and he’d come home.

He’d walk in through the gate and I-Chaya would be waiting for him. I-Chaya could come bounding up to him and Sarek wouldn’t realize that I-Chaya was... that something was wrong with him until it was too late.

She had to get to a phone. There were handsets all over the place upstairs. Where? She couldn’t remember where they were. She never paid attention. When somebody called, you could hear where the units were. Who needed to remember where you left them?

Who had called last night? Who had picked it up? Who ever actually called them?

The Terran ambassador and his wife hadn’t called for nearly a week. Nobody in Sarek’s family ever called him, and since he’d left his mother’s lab, nobody from there.

His stepfather called sometimes. He was the only one, and only once in a very long while. AJ never spoke to him; whenever his stepfather called, Sarek spoke to him for only a couple of minutes and in a very formal way. When Sarek didn’t know how to feel about something, he got very formal, even when he knew how he felt but didn’t know quite how to show it. Like when he wanted to tell her in words that he loved her, but he thought the words he was thinking were inadequate.

Oh God, oh God, oh God... Sarek could be walking into the court right now!

She had the baseball bat. She could protect herself with that. If she could just get to one of the handsets and get herself back in the basement, she could call out for help. She could catch Sarek before he left Council Place, or have a message forwarded up to Space Central Orbiting...

The call, last night - the ambassador’s office had called to tell Sarek about the conference! He’d left the handset on the chair next to his wardrobe. The bedroom was just around the corner form the basement door. She could dash in there, grab the handset and barricade herself in their bathroom if she had to. The bathroom door had a decent round doorknob that I-Chaya didn’t understand...

She had to steady herself on the stairs. Her balance was off because of the baby.

The baby. There was the baby. She should stay in the basement and wait. If Sarek were here, he’d say she should stay where she was safe.

She counted to three hundred slowly. That was five minutes. She counted to three hundred two more times. She rushed the last hundred. Fifteen Earth minutes gone by.

But what did that mean? What besa was it? The second? The third? They were each some number of Earth hours long. The Vulcan day was very long. Sarek had given her the length of a besa in Earth minutes once, but she’d forgotten the number.

She’d remembered it once. She’d used it to calculate how far along she was in Earth months. Vulcan months were longer than Terran months, but Vulcan women delivered in their seventh month. She wasn’t Vulcan, though. But Sarek was. No-one knew for sure whether their baby would be. She didn’t like the OB-GYNs at the Annex. They talked about her pregnancy and her baby as if she weren’t even in the room. They made frightening plans to monitor her during delivery and about what they’d have to do if the baby was in trouble. They’d made up a list of tests they’d wanted to perform - out of curiosity and scientific exploration - not for her benefit.

Sarek just plain didn’t trust them on principle. He was suspicious of men who specialized in delivering babies. That was just too alien - too unnatural - for Sarek. He wanted to bring in ‘the best Terran benor who is a woman’ to deliver their baby.

In the meantime, what if something was wrong with the baby? None of her test results were conclusive. Nothing registered the way it should. It had taken the doctors at the Annex until she was past her first trimester just to determine definitely by way of their tests that she was, indeed, pregnant. By that time, she was gaining weight, having the craves, and being short-tempered with Sarek.

AJ leaned her head against the basement door.

She didn’t know anything about babies. She knew the ages at which they were supposed to learn to walk and talk and reach for things, but she didn’t know how to take care of one. She had made all those charts and graphs to compare vulcan developmental stages to Earth ones. That was her work. She knew... It hurt suddenly to breathe. She knew... how tiny Vulcans were at birth. Even taking the longer month into consideration, Vulcan babies had less time to develop before they were born into this dry, desert environment. She’d assumed before she’d done any research that they’d follow the pattern and that it would be the other way around.

But it wasn’t. They were so helpless when they were born they couldn’t reliably maintain their own body heat. They had to be watched all the time. Their eyes were sealed shut for protection against the bright Vulcan sun, but their poor little heads were bald for months.

She had read that, compared to other similarly developed planets, that Vulcan had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the Federation. Not form neglect, not from disease or lack of medical care or a hygienic environment, but from simple failure to thrive.

“Many male can be sire to a child; only those worthy, who can be trusted to help care for it and keep it alive, are chosen to do so, to be the father and guardian to it. You chose me.”

The bat rubbed solidly against the wall as she pulled it out of the track. she waited for as long as she could hold her breath, and when she still didn’t hear anything, she shouldered the bat and lay her hand on the door handle.

What would she and this baby do without Sarek?

o0o

The door was stubborn for a few moments, then hissed strangely and slid open easily. The doorway itself was blocked.

It was the etagere - the bang she’d heard after she barred the basement door. That damned animal had ruined their potted plants!

She listened now for panting, gulping water, the padding of paws.

Nothing moved or breathed. Dust motes drifted through the sunbeam stretching across the corner of the hall. She smelled hot, outdoor air.

She found the door to the yard open. She’d closed it when she’d let I-Chaya in before. Now it was two-thirds open. AJ put her hand up to slide it closed, but the door caught in its tracks. They were filled with sand.

There was sand on the floor of the hallway. Sifted in through the open door, it was more than an inch deep where it had drifted against the walls. A sandstorm had come and gone while she was in the basement.

Outside, the garden path was invisible. There were broken branches lying on the ground from trees she’d never seen before. The gate to the public court had sprung open and the sand was so drifted against it she would never have been able to get it open otherwise.

The sitting room door was open, too. A tinted clerestory had fallen out intact and fine powder dusted the tops of tables and shelves and collected where their legs touched the floor. In the light from the gaping window frame, she could see the silica winking back at her from the upholstery.

How were they ever going to get sand out of the upholstery?

She found a handset under an overturned table. She tried it. Nothing. The transmitters were down, or maybe the unit was clogged with sand.

Sand. Everywhere. Deep and fine, it spread out across the floor, masking the fallen window and hiding even the pattern of grout in the tiled floor.

She knew this feeling; the coarser sand below the high tide line - the grainy, heel-sinking kind. 

Something was moving in the house. She felt it before she heard the sound - something dropping or shifting. From the sitting room door, AJ could see a set of footprints in the fine dusting of sand at the point where the two corridors met.

Looters?

No footprints at this end of the hall. They’d come in through another gate. AJ pulled the baseball out of the pocket on her gown. There was no calling the police. She’d let her curve loose at them, and if that didn’t bring them down, she’d have to use the bat.

She heard the sound again like cracking furniture. Her study, damn them!

“AJ?”

She stopped dead in the sand.

“AJ. Answer me.”

Sarek? He was calling for her, demanding her to answer him. She’d never heard his voice sound so sharp.

“AJ. You will answer me now!”

“Zar?” Her voice caught as if she had to test it softly first before calling out to him. He didn’t hear her....

“AJ... please....”

Then she heard a sound like a thousand splinters were being born. Something crashed hard inside the study. Her legs were gone, but she found her voice, “Sarek!”

Suddenly he was in the hallway... too lean, so tall in his suit. His left hand held fast to the study doorjamb where it had stopped him, in mid-flight.

The baseball bat dropped to the floor, the sound muffled in the sand. The baseball cut a tiny gully along the baseboard. She watched it go, unable to follow. 

“AJ,” he said abruptly, “you changed your clothes.”

The sand settled back onto the floor, onto his shoes. With an obvious effort, he opened his fingers and removed his hand from the doorframe. Formally, he nodded to her. He opened one careful fist and wrapped it around the other, holding both hands in front of him. He straightened his back. Composed now, formal, he stated, “You are unharmed, then...”

“Oh, Sarek...”

He was steel in her arms. Fresh from the heat outside, his muscles were icy hard. She felt for his spine through the layers of fabric. She rubbed his back and the bony knot at his neck until his arms locked tightly around her and his voice was in her ear. “You’re safe. You and....”

His arms grew hot, his ear warm and baby soft against her cheek. She couldn’t talk about that either. She hung on his shoulders, nodding into his neck. The smell of her shampoo still clung to the hair behind his ear. She felt the start of useless, unnecessary tears in her throat. She could wait for another shipment of shampoo. There would be no more shipments of Sarek.

“Where did you go?” he asked fiercely. His arms loosened suddenly. His hands closed into fists, then looked for places on her upper arms. “I tried to call you. I wanted to warn you of the danger but the storm was between us.”

His fingers tapped tentatively at her shoulders, then circled over them. “I knew you would not understand when the emergency broadcasts broke in. And then the winds came...”

He lifted her chin with the cup of one hand. “When the winds came, you would think it was a thunderstorm and want to watch it pass, to enjoy the wildness of the wind. You would not realize the danger. You would not know to go to the storm cellar.”

Emergency broadcasts, storm cellar? What was he talking about? She had to warn him about I-Chaya, the selat’s strange behavior.

“Sarek...” She grabbed one of his hands, “Sarek, we can’t stay here. We have to get away.”

“AJ, what is the matter?”

She managed to get him to the door of the spare bedroom. “He could be anywhere in the house. We’ve got to get out.”

“Who could be anywhere?” He took her by the shoulders again.

“I-Chaya..” Hadn’t he noticed the selat wasn’t around? The first thing he would have done after searching for her would have been to look for I-Chaya. She scanned the sand quickly for footprints. The storm had sprung open the gate to the court. I-Chaya might be out there now. Other people could be in danger. “Is there anyone you call when an animal is sick?”

Sarek looked past her at the carnage in the sitting room. He didn’t understand. She shook his hands from her arms, made him look at her. “He was very sick, Sarek. He was....”

“He does not appear sick to me.”

She turned to follow his line of vision and her legs went out from under her. 

“My wife, the day has been too much for you.”

Suddenly, she was sitting in a side chair near the door. At the other end of the long room, sitting on a throw rug, calmly chewing on a broken vento frond was I-Chaya. “He was sick...”

“And he might well be if he eats enough of that vento. I-Chaya, drop.”

There was a bit of a tussle over the broken branch, but not a growl out of the animal’s mouth - just a whine and an attempt to back slowly away with the branch inhis mouth and take Sarek along with it.

“I-Chaya. Drop it. The house is mess enough without your regurgitating vento all over it. I said ‘drop’.”

The animal finally let go of the branch. He sneezed. Then he came padding toward AJ.

o0o

She must have screamed. She remembered knocking over the chair and scrambling for the door.

“He’s gone now, my wife. I’ve sent him out to the garden.”

She allowed him to set the chair back on its legs then lead her to the bed in the guest room and settle her on it. He sat beside her on the edge and rubbed her hands being patient until she wanted to strangle him. “He growled at me. He snarled and showed his teeth.”

“I-Chaya?”

He tried to feel her face to see if she were overheated. She wanted to push his hands away from her in rage. Tears came and she bit them back. The animal had been acting like a rabid dog before Sarek had come home. Now it was as if he hadn’t flipped a whisker at her, like a person who denied in public words spoken to you alone.

“Perhaps he was frightened by the storm,” Sarek offered patiently.

“There wasn’t any storm.” She yanked her hands out of his. “I’d locked myself in the basement to get away from him. I didn’t know about the storm until I came up, worried that I-Chaya would hurt you when you came home from the meeting.”

She explained about the nightshirt. She described following I-Chaya from their bedroom to the garden. How I-Chaya had chased her from the study and cornered her at the basement door. His face remained infuriatingly impassive throughout, as if untouched or unsurprised.

There was a strange voice in the house. Sarek heard it, too.

“That will be City Rescue,” he told her, then called out something over his shoulder in Vulcan. He stood up, reaching again for her hands. “I must assure them that we are in no need of medical attention so that they may proceed to the next house.”

He looked at her as if he were afraid she would break under his gaze, as if he were trying to decide if maybe a psychiatric evaluation wasn’t needed after all.

“I’m all right, Sarek.”

She took her hands out from between his and folded them in her lap. She sat and waited while Sarek talked to the woman from City Rescue. She had appeared at the bedroom door with I-Chaya in tow. The animal was fascinated by something he smelled in the field bag the woman had slung over her shoulder.

“Will you be all right while I show the restoration team the damage?”

She told him ‘yes’. When Sarek left with the woman, the selat trotted off behind her, still sniffing at the field bag.

She cold be furious or she could be afraid. That animal had threatened her. She had heard him roar. But the thought that she had over reacted to his aggressiveness, or blown his behavior all out of proportion, or had imagined the unanimal-like intelligence in his eyes due to some pregnant-hysterical episode was what really frightened her.

And it was what Sarek would ultimately think. How could he believe otherwise with that damned animal letting strangers into the house without blinking, then trotting happily down the hall with his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth like nothing had happened?

She heard Sarek’s voice in the hall, retreating, audible long after the questions of the woman from the rescue team had faded. AJ tried to concentrate on what he was saying, but the words had given way to a soothing buzz, even if her spoken vocabulary had been up to making sense of them. Sometimes, Sarek wold speak to her in Vulcan, to help her learn, but he would give it up if she had too much trouble understanding him.

Sarek spoke so softly, but his voice carried. Just then she thought she heard him give a command to I-Chaya from the far end of the hall, then heard that plaintive pooah sound the selat made when he was trying to get his way or wanted attention.

Perhaps Sarek was right, and the animal had been frightened by the storm. Terran animals were more susceptible to changes in the wind and in air pressure than humans were; they had been known to sense earthquakes coming even before the monitors did. Why would it be any different on Vulcan? I-Chaya was a big animal; maybe if he had been smaller his behavior wouldn’t have frightened her so much.

She didn’t hear Sarek’s voice anymore. She thought she heard scratchy footsteps. Then he came into the bedroom alone.

“We’ve been assigned highest because of your condition,” he said quietly. “The restoration team will be returning later today to remove the fallen trees and begin some other heavy work. They recommend we spend the night elsewhere. I want you to wait for me here while I pack our things.”

She said ‘yes’, but as soon as he had gone, she got antsy. She hadn’t seen the other rooms; she didn’t know how bad it was. The sand had blown in through the yard and from somewhere near the back of the house. Maybe the city had industrial-grade machines to take care of that.

AJ got up from the bed and went to peek around the edge of the door to make sure Sarek was out of sight before she slipped into the hall. If they were going to have to go to a hotel for a few days, she’d better pack up her books and things to take with them. What with the storm and I-Chaya’s farting around, she’d gotten absolutely nothing....

The study had been transformed. The large tinted window was gone, The thick, old vento tree that had stood in the yard outside had been blown down in the storm and been forced through the glass, taking a bookcase and a tapestry with it. Its terminal canopy filled the room, hiding most of her dest and Sarek’s and what it didn’t, the fallen tapestry did. Sticking out from under all this wreckage was the tail-end of her father’s old bathrobe, still damp-darkened from I-Chaya’s wet mouth, crushed like the chair it had been draped over.

She’d been wearing that bathrobe in the morning when Sarek had left.

“Come away from there.” His voice startled her. His hands under her elbows commanded her.

“Did you think... I was under there?” That’s where she’d been that morning when he left: pouting at her desk and pretending that she didn’t hear him say good-bye. And he had been digging under there to find her. He could have been killed.

He led her into the hall. “You were safe in the storm cellar,” was all he said.

The storm cellar... the reason for the food down there - and the vid! Probably a phone down there, too, if she’d thought to look for it.

The door to it still stood open, a dark hole at the end of the hall now that the lights were off. The etagere still lay where she had stepped over and through it. The base ball bat lay at an angle in the sand where she’d dropped it when Sarek had come out of the study. She could have killed him.

He moved the suitcase and made her put her feet up on the bed in the spare room and then dutifully tucked pillows behind her back. He asked her if she wanted a drink.

“Sarek...”

He was trying to comfort here. she didn’t want him to comfort here. She wanted him to be angry with her. He was only making her feel worse.

“Listen to me now,” he said. “You have had too many frights today: first I-Chaya’s silliness with the storm and now the damage to our house. But there is nothing done that cannot be put right again.”

He sat beside her on the edge of the bed and took the whole side of her face in one big hand. “Please...stop. For me.”

She tried to rub her eyes dry with her fists. She heard a drawer opening and tissues appeared.

“I’m sorry...”

“No need,’ he said. “Now, I will finish packing our things and we will go to the transport.”

He threw the used tissues away. “Once we are settled in the inn, we will have a nice meal together. You will rest comfortably, and you will feel better.”

No she wouldn’t. She’d just feel awful. “But your meeting..”

“We never left for Space Central. The storm came off the Sas-a-shar and grounded the shuttle. Then we were all sent home to see to our families.”

He reconsidered that for a moment. “Or the Vulcan team was sent home. The Tellarites will not be pleased.”

She’d heard about Tellarites. ‘Not pleased’ was probably putting it very delicately.

She smiled a little at that and realized that he had meant her to. Sarek stood up then, looking at her with bright eyes.

“Now, I want you to lie here and rest while I finish packing.”

“I’ll come and help you.”

“You will stay here,” he told her. “It’s not safe for you in our bedroom.”

Oh, no... “My quilt...”

“The quilt is undamaged.”

She’d told him to leave that quilt in the chest for best... She swung her feet over the edge of the bed. “Let go of me, Sarek.”

“You will stay.”

She wrestled with him. “I want to put my quilt away...”

“I will see to it.”

“But I want...”

He held her fast. “You will stay here.”

“Sarek...”

“I will not have you anywhere near broken glass.”

 

A shiver went up her back. He felt it. And gently, he took his hands from her arms. He let a held breath go slowly from his chest.

“Now,” he said, “you will wait here until I bring the rest of our things. And there will be no argument.”

He hesitated, waiting for her to protest. When she didn’t, he walked toward the door without meeting her gaze once.

“Sarek..” He stopped without turning around. “How many glass windows do we have?”

“You are meaning the old sand glass?” He kept his back to her.

“We had two. The picture window in the study and...”

“And the one in our bedroom.”

From a long way off, they heard I-Chaya’s panting. Sarek knew. He’d already seen the study and their bedroom. He’d known the minute she’d told him about the nightshirt where she’d have been in the house when the storm hit.

Sarek waited in the doorway. The big animal came to the door and nosed Sarek’s hand and leaned against his leg. AJ remembered the roaring and frantic pawing through the thick basement door.

“He wanted to come down in the storm cellar with me, Sarek, but I didn’t understand. I locked him out. He could have died up here.”

Or been blinded. Or a number of other things that she remembered hearing were injuries common to sandstorms. As it was, she saw now that the poor animal had chipped one of his big front teeth.

Even as Sarek scratched the back of his neck the selat whined and shifted his weight nervously. 

Sarek looked back at her now. “He knows you are no longer his freind and that you do not trust him. And he is not able to know why.”

“I don’t know how...to make it right.”

“Call him to you. Talk to him as you used to do.”

She did and he came.

The top of his head wrinkled under her hand, and his eyes closed when she scratched it. He made his pooah-pooah sound again, muffled against the mattress. “Good boy, good boy...”

You saved my life. She patted his nose and he looked up at her. “Shake hands, I-Chaya. Shake hands.”

She held out her hand. He backed up and sat back on his haunches. For a moment, she thought he might finally do it. Then he stretched his paws out in front of him and made a deep bow, tucking his head under and to one side in great gravity and dignity.

“You see, my wife? He is a gentleman. He bows to the wife of a future ambassador.”

“Oh...” She laughed. Then, the animal was back on his haunches again, his big mouth open in a wide selat smile, his eyes squinting. With the tip of one of his fangs gone, his poor silly face looked lopsided. “Poor thing.”

“It doesn’t seem to hurt him.” Sarek sat beside her and scratched one of I-Chaya’s jowls. “But we will have the healer look at it.”  
She tugged on his other hand until he leaned near. She kissed his cheek and noticed for the first time that there were scratches there, scattered, as if h’e plunged through a dense hedge. His nose was smudged. She reached out to rub the smudge away and he caught her fingers in his own. 

“I came as soon as I could...”

“Your new suit...” She touched the sleeve. It hadn’t come loose at the seam; there was a jagged tear across the upper arm.

“The sand is high in the roadway. I had to climb the gate.”

“But the court gate is open.”

A big breath went out of his chest. “That did not occur to me.”

He looked away. then he looked back at her to see if this lapse in calm, rational thought disappointed or moved her.

She was ashamed. She’d been horrible to him that morning. He’d had an important meeting to attend, and what had she done? Declared psychological warfare on him before he left. This time, he was just a recorder. But one day, things would be different.

He gave her hand a final squeeze. He had to nudge I-Chaya back to get up from the bed. “The transport will be here soon. And this time I will have your promise to do as your husband requests and remain here where you are safe until we are ready to leave.”

He reached out and lifted her chin to soften the finality of his words. “Yes?”

She nodded. He went and was back almost immediately with his carry-bag and hers. Again, he left to fetch a hamper of food for I-Chaya. “There’s just the laundry, and then we will go.”

The selat had followed him in and out of the room; now he put his nose into the basket until Sarek scolded him. When Sarek left, he sat back and watched the basket as if staring at it would levitate one of the biscuits out of the container. AJ was suddenly reminded of how Sarek liked to nose around the kitchen when she was trying to cook.

She leaned back into the pillows. The power was out. The air was getting hotter. The first thing she would do when she got to the hotel was throw herself in the shower, and if they didn’t have one, she’d soak in one of those deep Vulcan tubs.

 

She glanced toward the clock on the far wall. Was it that early?

For the first time, AJ noticed that the sofa along the short wall of the spare bedroom was crooked; one end had been pulled out from the wall and there was something behind it on the floor... Sarek’s nightshirt. The animal didn’t seem to have any interest in it now. Earlier, it had been the most important thing in the world ot him. It was Sarek’s something that had Sarek’s smell on it.

I-Chaya had known the storm was coming and was afraid of it. He’d found the nightshirt in the bathroom and the smell of Sarek on it had been comforting to him, had made him feel secure. And she had tried to take his secruity way from him. This is where I-Chaya must have ridden out the storm, she decided. She could imagine him trying to hide his massive bulk behind the delicate little bedroom sofa.

Sarek came back with the laundry and set it on the foot of the bed. She watched him fold the things he wanted to take with them and set them aside.

“Sarek,” she said quietly, “what was that you used to say when I first knew you, when you were trying to explain how Vulcans felt about eating meat...”

He unsnapped the locks on the suitcase. “Yes. One does not feed upon its own flesh, and we are the same flesh, I-Chaya’s kind and mine. He is born to a mother as I was born to one and fed the same as I.”

There was more. She remembered him saying it. “He is a ‘breed apart, but no lesser nation’.”

‘That’s from something, isn’t it?”

He nodded. He shifted things n the suitcase to make room. She caught his eye when he looked up. “Yes... by a poet who knew well the desert. She was speaking of the le-matya, but....”

Hoof!

“The food can’t hear you, I-Chaya.”

Sarek struggled to get the basket shut and fastened. He had to lean on it with his knee, pulling hard against the straps. I-Chaya watched him. And AJ watched I-Chaya until the selat lifted his head and looked at her, locked yes with her, in a way that human and animal rarely did.

“We’ll have to go through the alley,” Sarek was saying. He came to help her up from the bed. “It will be cooler in any case if the transport hasn’t yet arrived.”

Their carry-bags slung around his neck, he swung the suitcase from the bed and spoke to I-Chaya in Vulcan.

For one more moment, their eyes met, then in the next moment, I-Chaya grinned at her with his new, broken-tooth selat grin and panted foolishly before taking the handle of his food hamper in his mouth the way Sarek told him and took it out of the room and down the hall.

“Are you ready?” Sarek asked. He offered her his arm, shifting the suitcase packed so carefully with fresh clothes from the laundry.

Shakily, she nodded to him, glancing back at the crooked sofa.

“Don’t worry about the house, AJ. Once the repairs are finished, everything will be as it was.”

She lay her hand on his arm, but for the moment, did not move. From where she was sitting, AJ could see the hang tag still attached to the sleeve of Sarek’s new nightshirt.

o0o

The end.

o0o

We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. At present, we see their whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein, we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston

o0o

**Author's Note:**

> o0o
> 
> We need another and wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. At present, we see their whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein, we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
> 
> Henry Beston
> 
> o0o


End file.
